BREAKING: Hacker Group Demands 10,000 Bitcoin or They’ll Release Everyone’s Middle School Poetry

Published April 29th 2025
By Sal A. Mander, Chief Editor

In an unexpected twist to the modern cyber-warfare playbook, a shadowy hacker collective known only as “The Midnight Scribes” has taken responsibility for what experts are calling “the most emotionally devastating data breach in human history.” Forget bank accounts. Forget private emails. Forget government secrets.

This time, they’re threatening to expose humanity’s most shameful digital skeletons: our middle school poetry.
Yes — the notebooks. The Word docs. The rhyming couplets about betrayal, dragons, acne, and that one substitute teacher with “eyes like the ocean.” Unless the global community coughs up a ransom of 10,000 Bitcoin, these adolescent atrocities will be unleashed upon the internet like an open mic night gone rogue.

How Did They Get It?

According to a grainy YouTube video released by the group (shot entirely in candlelight with an aggressively angsty soundtrack), the hackers claim to have infiltrated old email accounts, long-forgotten LiveJournal archives, obsolete school district servers, and at least one MySpace poetry group called “Soul Quakes ’04.”

A masked spokesperson—identified only as “InkWrath”—read a chilling statement in stanzas:

“We have your sonnets, your free verse,
Your rhymes about sadness, romance, and worse.
Pay the ransom, avoid the disgrace,
Or your teen angst will be all over the place.”

A sample leaked poem reportedly retrieved from a 2007 folder titled Poetry DO NOT READ reads:

“The stars are in the sky,
But they don’t notice me,
Why must the moon always be so high,
And the rain fall so free?”

Cybersecurity firms describe this as “the literary equivalent of the nuclear codes being stolen and replaced with a badly drawn anime wolf.”

A World Reacts in Panic

The global response was immediate and visceral. Former students from ages 18 to 48 began frantically Googling “how to erase old hard drives with fire.” Reddit forums filled with posts like “HELP I THINK THEY HAVE MY ZANGA PASSWORD” and “Is it illegal to bribe a hacker with vintage Pokémon cards?”

Fake quote from a cybersecurity analyst, Dr. Riley Firestone of the International Cringe Observatory:

“It’s the perfect form of psychological warfare. People can survive identity theft. They can survive doxxing. But no one survives the resurfacing of a metaphor comparing sadness to a broken vending machine.”

Meanwhile, therapists worldwide report a surge in emergency appointments with clients experiencing what psychologists now term “Sonnet Shock Syndrome.”

Tech Giants & Journal Hoarders Step In

In a bizarre show of unity, Silicon Valley’s biggest tech firms—Google, Microsoft, even Ask Jeeves (resurrected for this crisis only)—have pooled resources to develop countermeasures.

One anonymous developer claims to be working on an AI that can scan and reword poems to make them sound like they were written last week in a graduate-level creative writing seminar.

Even public libraries are stepping up security, placing 24/7 guards near archival “Young Authors” sections and dusty journals once deemed “too emotionally unstable to catalogue.”

Fake quote from a creative freedom advocate, Lydia Phoenix-Dawn, founder of The Teen Muse Project:

“Let them release the poems. We’ve suppressed our cringe for too long. If we don’t confront our past metaphors, we’re doomed to relive them — again and again, like... a carousel of feelings we cannot exit.”

She then reportedly sobbed into a thrifted copy of Chicken Soup for the Teenage Soul.

What Comes Next?

As the deadline looms, one thing is certain: this may be the only time in history that burning your middle school notebooks is considered a national security strategy.

Governments, schools, and embarrassed thirty-somethings await the hacker group’s next move. Meanwhile, the Midnight Scribes remain silent, their intentions unclear—save for one haunting tweet posted at 3 a.m.:

“Roses are red,
Violets are blue,
Pay us the Bitcoin,
Or we’re leaking you.”

Stay tuned to Shifty Lizard Times for live coverage, defensive journaling tips, and interviews with former goths now in positions of political power. This isn’t just a digital crisis — it’s a literary reckoning.